Size doesn't matter in Percival Portrait awards

This year's Percival Portrait major prize winner has proved that when it comes to portraits, size does not matter.

Melbourne artist Nick Mourtzakis was awarded the top prize for his work, A Portrait of Alex Wodak, which is at least a fifth of the size of the other portraits.

Writer, artist and critic Elizabeth Cross from Melbourne was invited to judge the 2008 competition.

"Last year I judged the Townsville Art Society awards... I enjoyed being here hugely and found that there was a great resonance between me and the work that goes on in this terrific gallery," she says.

Ms Cross explains that the winning portrait of Alex Wodak, a Sydney doctor who has been very active in public health, is the smallest painting in the exhibition.

"The sense of monumentality of the painting feels much bigger than its actual size," Ms Cross says. "And yet the paint is handled with extraordinary delicacy and restraint. There's a very strong sense of a very, very forceful individual."

Ms Cross says she has found the judging process both a difficult but very rewarding experience.

"There's quite a range and there are quite exciting works here," she says.

"Very disparate understandings of what a portrait might constitute, but still some of them very much within this strong sense we have as a public that the portrait is something that we own; that we can demand reasonable things out of a portrait, and all the works in this exhibition that have been selected do match up to that."

From the 138 entries the Perc Tucker Gallery received, Ms Cross selected only 35 works to be hung in the main exhibition.

She then awarded the major prize for the highest quality or most outstanding work to Nick Mourtzakis, and four highly commended prizes to:

The works not selected for the exhibition will be hung in another part of the gallery dubbed the Salon des Refuses, in the tradition of the Impressionists.

"There are a lot of considerations when you're looking at a work," Ms Cross explains. I always do want to see a kind of consistency in handling the whole painting, but I also want that strength of a sense of an individual portrayed."

Ms Cross will conduct a walk through at the gallery from 9.30am on Saturday July 26 and will then present a lecture on portraiture at 11am.

It will be an opportunity for artists and the public to hear Ms Cross's constructive criticism.